Make Out

Shadow Box 8

"Make Out" is the eight piece in the Shadow Box series of interactive displays with a built-in computerized tracking system. This piece shows thousands of internet videos of couples looking at each other: as soon as someone stands in front of the display his or her silhouette is shown and all the couples within it begin to kiss. The massive array of make-out sessions continues for as long as someone is in front of the work, --as he or she moves away all the kissing ends.

The collector can choose what proportion of the videos are man-woman, woman-woman or man-man. The default state is the statistically faithful proportion of the videos that are online: 50 per cent woman-woman, 30 per cent man-man and 20 per cent man-woman.Periodically, the display shows all videos in the database simultaneously. The piece exists also as a large projection or as an installation with plasma screens. In these, the detected presence of passers-by triggers a wave of kissing in huge arrays of up to 8,000 simultaneous video clips.